Deputy Prime Minister and Culture Minister Piotr Gliński was speaking at a ceremony in eastern Poland to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Majdanek Nazi German concentration camp, where some 80,000 people, including 60,000 Jews, perished during the war.
"It must be emphasised that Poland takes proper care of sites within its territory where atrocities and extermination were once perpetrated by its German oppressors," Gliński said on Monday.
He added: “We also keep alive the memory of the victims …”
Gliński told those at the ceremony: "We set an example to the modern world when it comes to remembering and keeping memory alive.”
The Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek, known as Konzentrationslager Lublin, existed in German-occupied eastern Poland between October 1941 and July 1944. It was one of the first concentration camps to be liberated by Allied forces during World War II.
Poland’s ambassador to Israel said earlier this year that his country was the “only state in Europe to properly honour the Holocaust.”
In an op-ed piece published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Ambassador Marek Magierowski said that no other nation in Europe could equal Poland’s “scrupulous care” of “the material legacy of the Holocaust.”
Meanwhile, Israel's ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, on Monday led a March of Remembrance to mark 77 years since the Germans began deporting Jews from the World War II-era Warsaw Ghetto.
Marchers paid homage to the 300,000 or so Warsaw Jews who were deported and subsequently murdered by the Nazi Germans at the Treblinka death camp.
Israeli Ambassador Anna Azari (first row, left) leads the annual March of Remembrance in the Polish capital on Monday.
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Source: PAP